I started keeping diaries when I was about 12 years old, which then gradually grew – over multiple diaries – to encompass musings outside of my own life, and eventually, ideas for stories and books began to take shape. For decades I kept writing, to the point where I have become an ardent collector of my own manuscripts.

My circumstance and my stories may be unique to me, but I strongly believe that the things at the core of my stories – despair, anger, love, loneliness, fear, joy – are things everyone experiences over the course of their life. Someone, somewhere, at some point, has needed to know just that: that they are not alone in feeling and thinking the way they do, and that the world sometimes does feel too mean and cold for us to thrive. I’ve often been in that position, myself, and writing was sometimes the only way I got through sad days.